ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author asks: how do the discourse and practice of downtown redevelopment work to construct the imagined community? How does this erase the existing majority community from consideration? What are some practices to achieve these aims? Last, what does the downtown district look like during the transition from serving Mexican, working-class, immigrant consumers to serving CC and middle-class consumers? The author examines how the social construction of the imagined community occurred in Santa Ana, from the Artists Village up to and surrounding the proposed Station District. The ten-block Artists Village, Orange County's first publicly subsidized artist colony, opened on the southwest portion of the downtown and within strolling distance of La Cuatro in 1994. The threat of alienating business types to La Cuatro is, as he have chronicled, a real lived experience to business owners in the area and anti-gentrification activists, one that could begin to encroach inward toward the thriving heart of the downtown.
